Salford Red Devils v Leeds Rhinos: Visitors in 'a good place mentally' ahead of long-awaited return to Super League action

Agar has delayed naming a team to his players until Saturday's final captain’s run and confirmed the side who face Salford will not have trained together since before Covid struck more than two weeks ago.

Five Rhinos players have been away on international duty and featured on Friday when England were beaten 26-24 by Combined Nations All Stars.

Several others only completed their return to play protocol, following coronavirus, tomorrow (Saturday).

Salford have named a much-changed squad from their win at Huddersfield Giants eight days ago and Agar admitted Rhinos don’t know who they will be facing.

“You can imagine the difficulties of having 10 days off, having five internationals out of your team and having Covid issues,” Agar said.

“This week, we’ve just got to make it about ourselves. That’s no disrespect to Salford, but we can’t predict their team, we don’t really know our team at the moment so we’ve got to make it about doing what we do and doing it well. The sole focus of our prep’ this week has been on us.”

The game will come a day short of a month since Rhinos’ last fixture, a 60-6 win away to Castleford Tigers.

Agar admitted it has been a “disrupted and disjointed build-up”, but insisted: “The positive part is the boys are itching to play.

“We have talked about everybody stepping up to the plate and rather than expecting our England boys, who are some of our strongest players, to have an impact on the team, we want to carry them a little bit.

“We’ve set that challenge to our guys, so while we might have lost the physical momentum and cohesion we had in our last game - and we’ve been unable to establish it on the training field this week, just because of the personnel we’ve had missing - mentally they are in a good place.